the wrong comparison

 

A second degree in Eighty One:
then she maybe 2 or 3 days
older than me.
                       Did I say days?
In Celtic reckoning.
With age years have reduced their sum.

I'm put in mind of old, grey-bearded
Rip van Winkle who fell asleep,
his 20 winks at once become 
as many years: long, wasted years.

Or perhaps not wasted, merely spent
beyond the fellow’s cognisance
in latent recognition.

That would make sense to me.
Gluck then.
Well, there's a woman.

Queen of Cats, Louise G.

Louise Glück, Nobel Laureate Lit, 

Time for another look at Glück.  I enjoyed Vita Nova, picked up Faithful and Virtuous Night then tailed off, i'll try something more.  Meanwhile i've pre-ordered In Code, very unusual for me. I guess i'm a Corbett man. The point is,  Americans carry the fire.

Poetry Salzburg

PSR

Three poems included in the forthcoming PSR, at last the doors have opened.  I have been a subscriber off on and for 4 or 5 years (god knows) and I have a soft spot for Salt Hill, though my accompanying poem never has and probably never will find it's way back into the light.  Less of that, here i am now!

Fellow pot Quentin Cowdrey is in the next issue - and his Stanza buddy Colin Pink, who joined us at the Poetry Cafe an October or two ago, also has poems, and a collection with Poetry Salzburg.  Editor Wolfgang is on our Christmas list.

This edition includes contributions from Sharon Black, David Cooke, Peter Robinson, Penelope Shuttle:  3 from Dominic James, did i mention that? okay then.

Monday Writer

 https://sentinelquarterly.com/monday-writer/dominic-james/

Not just a pretty face, no indeed.  

Top marks to anyone who can replace the carriage returns in 4 poems posted, in this SLQ feature
and the link to a scrambling clip is just the starting point of a series that will have good sound and picture quality: any poets welcome to get in touch if they'd like to try their work in front of the teleprompter with white or green screen. YouTube

Maryann Corbett

Rereading the Aeneid, Book IV

Sting of a memory, roused from its coils in the roots of the Latin:

     raising my voice to my teacher, right there in the hallway. I lost it—

     my grip on the weave of the grammar, the veiled indirectness of footnotes.

     Red-faced, incensed at her hint that not all of the weeping was Dido's.

     Calling Aeneas a jerk and a rat, almost shouting that duty,

     piety, vows to the gods were all lies.

                                                                      And her face. And her eyebrows

     (bristly and white and just visible under the edge of a wimple)

     knitting. Then both of us suddenly silent. The bell. And then moving

     stone-faced toward chemistry class, while across on the opposite stairwell,

     slouching, a certain young perfidus carefully stared at his loafers.

First published in The Dark Horse.

​

Maryann Corbett’s fifth book, In Code, will be published by Able Muse in 2020. Her work has won the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and has been included in The Best American Poetry 2018.

Alchemy

This paperback has been with me for 40 years. I loved it as a teenager and am just as engrossed today.  Wiser by a lifetime?  I guess not, in the final analysis, we discover only ourselves.

Hats off to the chemist’s son who recommended Mann, and detail of Lovis Corinth's self portrait is still the right cover illustration for me.

and eat no fish

Tom Fleming, memorable as Kent in the 1971 Peter Brook and Paul Scofield production of Lear.  I’m reminded how good he was seeing a portion of the recent production the other night.  A good cast, as I judge and all enthusiasts, BUT, Kent cuts to the soul of the piece, we reduce his part at our peril. We need his age and quality.  Marvellous bloody play

KENT

I do profess to be no less than I seem; to serve
him truly that will put me in trust, to love him
that is honest, to converse with him that is wise
and says little, to fear judgment, to fight when I
cannot choose, and to eat no fish.

LEAR

                               What art thou?

KENT

A very honest-hearted fellow,
and as poor as the king.

LEAR

If thou beest as poor for a subject
as he’s for a king, thou'rt poor enough.
What wouldst thou?

…

What services canst thou do?
KENT

I can keep honest counsel, ride, run, mar a curious
tale in telling it, and deliver a plain message
bluntly: that which ordinary men are fit for, I am
qualified in: and the best of me is diligence.

KING LEAR

How old art thou?

KENT

Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing, nor
so old to dote on her for any thing: I have years
on my back forty eight.

LEAR

Follow me…

Macaroni

Two corona touched poems hitched to video below.  My video chops.  And more here:   YouTube

If they’re amusing do subscribe AND if your poetry deserves a permanent airing, do get in touch. 

Around here, Covid-19 remains at a distance despite cautions growing into the shape of a crisis.  A devil’s advocate piece below didn’t make the film and narration practice linked through above, which in the end included a shot of McG washing his hands rather than my fiddling about with autofocus over the taps at home. Here we wait, follow the daily count, weigh the human cost as best we can. Predictions are only a working out of the problem.

Pilate Washing His Hands, Matthias Stom

Clean hands

The old man believes in legalese: Clean hands,
he says, shows seamless palms to illustrate
a point, in part he means to keep good conscience.
As if he thought, like Pontius Pilate,
washing hands gained distance from his office.
I’d say, sophistry lacks heart.

The stain runs deep below the skin
and will not fade,

                        duty is owed community,
neighbours, parents, it will not do to say:
I do not know, I did not act. 
In truth, I did not want to know. In fact, 
I dare not think about – what would you say? –
the family at large.

In short, he might say: Let them rot.
Humanity. That seething mass,
in all its dirty ways.

Cuckoo

Oh the Cuckoo she’s a pretty bird,
 She singeth as she flies,
She bringeth good tidings,
She telleth no lies.

She sucketh white flowers
For to keep her voice clear,
And the more she singeth cuckoo
The summer draweth near.

Symbols of Transformation

Wm James on the perennial attraction of the cross is echoed in Robert Lowell’s Prayer for the Union Dead -  “he rejoices in man’s lovely, peculiar power to chose life and die.” Lowell would have been familiar with James’s Varieties of Religious Experience.  As the reading runs deeper, sacrifice returns with Jung, seeing the direction of the adult life-energy broadly channelled – canalised - towards rebirth, utilising the unconscious as the ‘creative matrix of the future… establishing a relationship between ego [consciousness] and the unconscious.’ I won’t confound myself offering more.  ‘Nietzsche probably means something of the kind in his poem:

Why hast thou enticed thyself
Into the old serpent’s Paradise?
Why hast thou stolen
Into thyself, thyself?

A sick man now,
Sick of the serpent’s poison;
A captive now
Who drew the hardest lot:
Bent double
Working in thine own pit,
Encaved within thyself,
Burrowing into thyself,
Heavy-handed,
Stiff,
A corpse –
Piled with a hundred burdens,
Loaded to death with thyself,
A knower!
Self-knower!
The wise Zarathustra!
You sought the heaviest burden
And found yourself.’

Frederick Nietzsche

Perhaps this brings Pound’s The Return, to mind. And we might find deeper significance if we bear in mind Christ’s last journey through Jerusalem.  Jung concludes his passage on what it is the hero carries – the burden is himself – noting :  ‘As Gerhart Hauptmann says:  “Poetry is the art of letting the primordial word resound through the common word.”

Uneasy

We watch the news with mild concern as work goes down the drain.  No great struggles here, to date, more volunteering anticipated. There’s a new spirit abroad.  Poetry then.  & The weather continues charming.  With the finishing touches still to go on:  Clean Hands, and Watching the Cruisers Below:   this old number has a prior claim on isolation.  More videos to follow.

All we are saying

The League of Poets are producing a giant anthology on peace, widely published and available, my contribution here, slender as it is, charity starts at home:

Helen’s day bed

How calmly she lies among the olive trees
above the bay, on her mattress, 
eyes closed against the tranquil day oblivious
to canopied white fishing boats below
that ply their way through fields of rippled blue,

and all around this drift of velvet butterflies – 

unorganised in midday flight – and lizards in the sun:
an excavator’s drill’s clamour in the valley down
seems further off than it can be.

Somewhere undisturbed, she’s cushioned, sheltered,
brown body bared in quiet calm, Helen
in her peaceful mind sinks in the sand,
warm sand, on the shores of the world.